500 Year Plan

My recent bike trip through the Duwamish watershed in Seattle's industrial corridor was a humbling wake up call. The original home of Chief Seattle's tribe, and of the early farms that fed Seattle's growing population in the early days of our city, the Duwamish is now one of the most toxic Superfund sites in America, an estuary so thoroughly ruined by industrial abuse that, even after seventy million dollars in clean-up effort, it remains one of the most complicated toxic messes ever taken on by the federal government (see A River Lost in the Seattle PI). 

I'm as guilty of denial as anyone. I grew up here. I've driven by this paradise-turned-wasteland a thousand times on I-5. This is not an encouraging reality from any angle, and entering the belly of this beast is one of the more discouraging assignments I've given myself during my Circling Home year. If it took a century to inflict this damage, it may take 500 years to even begin repairing it. And of the original tribe that lived here, only a few dozen are left. One has to hunt hard for traces of the old sloughs and side channels that made up this signature delta of Seattle's youth.

Yesterday the Dalai Lama spoke at Seattle's Quest Field, situated on part of that same lost river delta. A Lumi elder helped introduce him and welcome him to Seattle. This elder's first words were in thanks to the Duwamish people for letting us gather on their land. For me, this trumped anything the Dalai Lama and other dignitaries had to say. There was something audacious and defiant about this gesture of respect and courtesy toward a lost tribe, this refusal to acknowledge that this land is anything other than their's.  

And in fact, the most potent witness to hope that I've encountered on my travels so far this year may be the building of a new ceremonial longhouse on the Duwamish River. The recovery of the longhouse tradition at tribal centers around the Salish Sea speaks to this refusal to accept the current bleak state of affairs on ancestral lands as final or permanent. In the case of the Duwamish, this pittance of ruined land, granted to them by the city of Seattle in the middle of a five mile-long Superfund Site, is almost laughable. But if one digs deeper it takes on a mythic significance in the life of the city and the region, and certainly of the tribe. These are the people among us endowed by culture with the longest view. These are the ones whose ancestry in this place goes deepest, and who are best equipped to reinvigorate the land with exactly the kind of cultural and spiritual resilience that we will all need if we are going to begin the long journey back toward ecological health and restoration.